Sighting in Domérat, November 27, 2013

At around 6 p.m., two people noticed a luminous phenomenon in the sky and watched it on and off for about an hour and a half. The sighting unfolded in three stages.

First, the witnesses saw a point of light in the north-east made up of two large yellow headlights with a red light in the middle. It stayed still, then vanished behind a building. This fits an aircraft or helicopter seen head-on with its lights on. Next, the witness's child saw a point of light pass over the house, which seemed to "rock" from side to side. Flightradar data and a military radar track show two aircraft flying over the area at high altitude at 18:02 and 18:05 (UTC). A helicopter was also active between 18:12 and 18:30 above a high-voltage line about 7 km south-west of the observation site. The witness's description was not precise enough to tell which aircraft had been seen.

At the end, a very bright, almost fixed point remained visible in the south-west for over an hour. It was without doubt the planet Venus, which was especially bright at the time (magnitude -4.7). The varied look of the witness's photos is explained by uneven focus settings and camera shake.

GEIPAN classified the case as A: Venus for the end of the observation, and probably aircraft and/or helicopters for the beginning.